Then in 2017, Springwatch presenter Martin Hughes-Games dubbed Planet Earth II “an escapist wildlife fantasy” and, last November, environmentalist George Monbiot published a devastating critique after Attenborough gave an interview in which he said that being too alarmist about the pressures facing wildlife would be a “turn-off”. Monbiot accused “the most trusted man in Britain” of breeding complacency and of betraying the living world he loves.

“For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world,” he wrote. “It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse.”

In an interview in this week’s Radio Times, Attenborough explained his former reticence. “At the time… the BBC was a monopoly, and if you have control over a source of information you have to be responsible. You can’t allow people to start belting out propaganda because they happen to feel a certain way.

The BBC is no longer anywhere near a monopoly, of course, and Attenborough has now narrated his first series for Netflix, Our Planet, in which the cash-burning streaming platform proves itself every bit as adept at creating ravishing prestige wildlife series as the BBC’s world-leading Natural History Unit – perhaps unsurprisingly as it is executive produced by two of the unit’s former heads. And rather than being “a little bit at the end”, the environmental message is trumpeted from the start.

Attenborough informs us that, “in the past 50 years, wildlife numbers have on average declined by 60 per cent and for the first time in human history, the stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted” (cut to an enormous ice-shelf cascading into the sea).

And before some stunning opening sequences of seabirds in Peru and flamingo chicks waddling to safety across a dried-up lake in Africa, Attenborough is quick to quash the old nature TV pretence that such bountiful wildernesses are numerous.

“Wildlife still flourishes in a few precious places,” he’s careful to add.

This upfront approach may not placate environmentalists who believe the veteran presenter ignores the systemic pressures facing wildlife – that his final film in Blue Planet II, for example, the one about plastic pollution, failed to address the deeper problem of mass disposability. That film did, however, cause a surge in awareness and has led to changes in consumer behaviour.

Meanwhile, of course, the BBC are desperate to attract younger viewers, people less interested in winning a Crackerjack pencil than skipping school to join climate-change protests.

It can be no coincidence that Attenborough’s heir presumptive at the BBC is Chris Packham, a far more controversial naturalist whose vehement opposition to hunting, for example, would once have made him seem too radical for the corporation.

As for Attenborough himself, later this spring the 92-year-old will present an “urgent” new BBC documentary, Climate Change – The Facts, which will focus on the threats to our planet and possible solutions.

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